»The German likes quarrelling.« Conflict and belonging in German diasporic communities around 1900

Discourses of inclusion and exclusion were an integral part of German nation building after 1871. The paper shows that they were not confined to the metropole but were, in fact, reciprocated abroad. Selected instances of conflict within German migrant communities around the world are taken as a springboard to analyze public contestations of (trans-)national belonging. The sources abound with gossip, aggressive bickering, and official complaints to authorities. Contentious issues cover the areas of politics, religion, class, and language. The case studies engage critically with a number of wider issues. First, they question contemporaneous interpretations of an Imperial diaspora as a unified and Heimat-oriented block. Second, on a theoretical level the article argues that internal ruptures are constitutive elements of diaspora construction and should be considered in concomitant theorizations. Third, the case studies highlight the close connection between diaspora and nation building. Fourth, the discourses studied did not only take place within communities, but also between them, as well as with the metropole, all in multi-directional ways. Questions of belonging were discussed around the world with strikingly similar arguments and terminology. Globalization was at work at the discourse level.

Making British Indian Fictions, 1772-1823

This book examines fictional representations of India in novels, plays and poetry produced between the years 1772 to 1823 as historical source material. It uses literary texts as case studies to investigate how Britons residing both in the metropole and in India justified, confronted and imagined the colonial encounter during this period. The study will situate the texts in relation to the shifting colonial context and to the changing attitudes towards India within Britain in general and on the part of Britons who had experience of living in India, such as East India Company men or their wives and daughters, in particular. Moreover, it will analyse how this literature responded to the increasing influence of the subcontinent on metropolitan culture. This book, then, approaches fictional texts as case studies that illuminate trends taking place within Britain such as the growing consumption of Indian-style imported goods and the commoditisation of an Indian aesthetic within British visual culture. Whilst the book will utilise fictional portrayals to comment upon shifts in the relationship between coloniser and colonised and to discuss the cross-cultural influences between the metropole and the colonial periphery, it also outlines how literary production and print capitalism played a part in shaping depictions of the subcontinent and stereotypes of the colonial 'other'. The study will also examine how representations of the subcontinent in British art and scholarship were influenced by metropolitan literary and popular culture. At the same time it will look at how representations by metropolitan authors influenced early-nineteenth century depictions by British authors who resided in India.

Shakespeare and the Colonial Encounter in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-03

Close encounters: international exhibitions and the material culture of the British Empire, c.1880-1940

Apparitions of empire and imperial ideologies were deeply embedded in the International Exhibition, a distinct exhibitionary paradigm that came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Exhibitions were platforms for the display of objects, the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas across and between regions of the British Empire, thereby facilitating contact between its different cultures and societies. This thesis aims to disrupt a dominant understanding of International Exhibitions, which forwards the notion that all exhibitions, irrespective of when or where they were staged, upheld a singular imperial discourse (i.e. Greenhalgh 1988, Rydell 1984). Rather, this thesis suggests International Exhibitions responded to and reflected the unique social, political and economic circumstances in which they took place, functioning as cultural environments in which pressing concerns of the day were worked through. Understood thus, the International Exhibition becomes a space for self-presentation, serving as a stage from which a multitude of interests and identities were constructed, performed and projected. This thesis looks to the visual and material culture of the International Exhibition in order to uncover this more nuanced history, and foregrounds an analysis of the intersections between practices of exhibition-making and identity-making. The primary focus is a set of exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-1880s and early-1900s, which extends the geographic and temporal boundaries of the existing scholarship. What is more, it looks at representations of Canada at these events, another party whose involvement in the International Exhibition tradition has gone largely unnoticed. Consequently, this thesis is a thematic investigation of the links between a municipality routinely deemed the ‘Second City of the Empire’ and a Dominion settler colony, two types of geographic setting rarely brought into dialogue. It analyses three key elements of the exhibition-making process, exploring how iconographies of ‘quasi-nationhood’ were expressed through an exhibition’s planning and negotiation, its architecture and its displays. This original research framework deliberately cuts across strata that continue to define conceptions of the British Empire, and pushes beyond a conceptual model defined by metropole and colony. Through examining International Exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, and visions of Canada in evidence at these events, the goal is to offer a novel intervention into the existing literature concerning the cultural history of empire, one that emphasises fluidity rather than fixity and which muddles the boundaries between centre and periphery.

Empire's Children: Soviet Childhood in the Age of Revolution

Ideas of childhood and citizenship stood at the center of the Soviet Union’s empire-building project during the 1920s and 1930s. After the 1917 Revolution the Bolsheviks were faced with the challenge of establishing a new state structure and governing a vast territory inherited from its tsarist predecessor. In the early years of the Soviet project, new leaders enlisted a cadre of professionals tasked with not only creating the norms of childhood and the everyday, but also implementing policies to modernize habits and values of the empire’s younger citizens. To understand how children became a prime focus of Soviet imperial and ethno-cultural politics, my dissertation employs discourse analysis and compares the ways in which Soviet imperial policies were implemented in two ethnically different regions: the Buddhist Republic of Kalmykia as the colonial case study and Moscow as the Metropole. The current project examines newspapers, treatises, and inspectors’ reports over the span of twenty years. It finds that the Bolsheviks’ initial values and discourses in the realm of children’s education, health, leisure and nutrition, all which were scientifically designed to transform children into ideal Soviet and modern citizens, changed over time as a result of the competing ideologies among local elites and the challenges they faced while intervening in children’s everyday lives. The most significant conclusion in this dissertation reveals that, contrary to previous scholarly arguments, the modernization projects that took place in Moscow and Kalmykia were more similar in the challenges and outcomes that local officials faced when implementing state policies.